Britain's Christian Society

When the Prime Minister repeated his view in April 2014 that Britain is a Christian country, it was hard to forget two things – what he said to Pope Benedict on his departure from England at East Midlands airport in 2010 and his argument against the Archbishop of Westminster over the effects of welfare reforms in February.


To Pope Benedict, Mr Cameron recalled Newman’s lesson from the decline of ancient Rome, about a state that had lost its “sentiment of sacredness” and its need for a “common bond of unity” based on more than the unanimity of self-interest (Lectures on the History of the Turks in their Relation to Europe, Lecture 7, Barbarism and Civilisation). Reflecting the Pope’s observation at Westminster Hall that British constitutional values concerning power, democracy and liberty have much in common with Catholic Social Teaching, he latched onto the Pope’s “challenge” for humanity to embrace its true purpose with “the new culture of social responsibility we want to build in Britain”, of which “faith is part of the fabric”. Such responsibility is more than working for the common good. It estimates Britain in theological terms, going beyond faith as personal profession, to faith - specifically the Christian faith - as defining British civilisation and a national life together conceived on Christian lines. Thus, whatever our hard-won tradition of tolerance and personal religious liberty, nonetheless Britain is a corporately Christian state.

 

On Cardinal Nichols (as he now is) he observed, “Many of the great political questions of our time are also moral questions – we should not be surprised, and nor should we be dismissive, when members of the clergy make their views known.  But neither should political leaders be afraid to respond…  The Archbishop of Westminster … offered a critique of this Government’s welfare reforms. I respect his view but I also disagree with it deeply.”

It is hard to reconcile the two comments. First he admires a society that is unified in purpose, bears a sacred character, and thus resonates with Catholic Social Teaching. Next, when a Catholic Social Teacher “challenges” (Mr Cameron’s word!) the direction that British society’s purpose is taking - because in its effects it is unpicking the fabric of the common good of which is part - it is extraordinary that he personally goes to the lengths of arguing against the Church’s moral critique of these effects, point by point, in The Daily Telegraph (18 February). It is important to recognise that the Cardinal was not casting doubt on the decency or good faith of political reformers, let alone involving himself with the practicalities which are the concern of party politics. But in any state, especially a professedly Christian state, Christian teaching about how the Kingdom of God is served in this world has to be heeded, not just noted “with respect”. For, far from being “simply untrue”, as the Prime Minister complained, everything Cardinal Nichols had stated about people’s safety net being withdrawn came from the direct experience of priests, parishes, charitable organisations and other dioceses and Churches across Britain. Thus he was merely doing what a certain type of British politician says the Church should confine itself to – defining what is right and where people are going wrong, and thus saving people’s souls. He had acknowledged that politicians were trying to repair public finances, as well as to break dependency, stimulate more employment and improve more prosperous livelihoods in a sustainable way, with the necessary support for those at greatest risk. But he also pointed out, whatever the good intentions, that systems and the politics behind them are not neutral or occupy a different compartment of the universe from the “spiritualities” – they boil down to personal effects on individual households; and when this causes hardship, especially noticeably wider hardship, there is a moral question to be answered. Thus the Cardinal was not just expressing his “views” with which the Prime Minister felt free to disagree “deeply”; he was speaking truth unto power. Power found this “challenge” uncomfortable, weighed it respectfully, set aside what it had earlier said to Pope Benedict, and rejected the Cardinal’s application of Catholic social teaching.

So did the Prime Minister also dismiss the “sentiment of sacredness” and the “common bond of unity” arising from it? When Mr Cameron says “Christian”, he means a rather individualised version of “Protestant”. In a Protestant society, the individual believer is his or her own interpreter of the Bible, needing no mediation from the Church for access to God, faith or salvation. The Church conducts worship based on the Bible and its clergy’s preaching is authoritative because the theology tradition claims it says nothing more, nothing less than is explicit in the text.  In such a society, this may be fine as long as the State likewise sees itself as subject to the Scriptures (and can thus use the Church to keep the people there too). But when the nature of the text of the Bible itself is open to question -  its formation, its origins, its literary genres, its historical and social contexts, its standing as  literal, analogical or allegorical truth – who is the interpreter then? What authority privileges the “view” of the Church – in other words, her teaching - when all the world is free to decide from out of the same Scriptures their own religious teaching and moral choice, rather than those of the Body as a whole?

Thus Britain, a confessionally Christian state, has abandoned the defence of marriage and family stability by facilitating divorce; it has undermined the corporate observance of Sunday and the principal Christian holy days (notably Good Friday and Ascension Day) in favour of the pressures of the market; it has engineered the exclusion of historic Catholic institutions that helped to found the nation’s childcare services from any further role in adoption and fostering; it is tacitly softening the application of the laws that strictly limit abortion and forbid euthanasia; it is barring the professional freedom of Catholics and other Christian doctors and nurses working in general practice and reproductive healthcare if they are conscientiously opposed to the termination of the lives of unborn children, or refuse to refer applicants to those who are not. There are numerous further examples.

Yet this is not because any of our succession of church-going Prime Ministers is not Christian. It is because they do not see that, beyond a moral or spiritual critique, the Church has bearing on society, and how individuals live their lives in good conscience and under the law, any more than anyone else. The individual is free to decide, the Archbishop of Westminster is entitled to his views and a Christian Prime Minister “deeply disagrees” with him. No one wants a theocracy, social rule by religious leaders. Nor do we want this or that political leader’s subjective impression of Christianity, its generalised values and supposed historic influences, rather than what it teaches and demands. Instead we need a society that is able to integrate, rather than balance off against each other, our political and our spiritual identity, one that is, as Mr Cameron himself said to Pope Benedict, a “fabric” where faith is not a patch stitched on but in the weave.

For this to happen, England needs the Christians of this country to be united, not at odds. A society with political, social, historical, moral and spiritual integrity deserves a Church that brings Christ’s voice to bear upon it because she is His Body exemplifying His wholeness in humanity; a society without wholeness even more deserves the Church that brings integrity to its political, social, historical, moral and spiritual identity for it truly to be humanity. Only the Catholic Church can provide this; not because its universal extent in time and place can be all-encompassing, but because its social teaching is the teaching of Christ about human beings and how they are designed by God in the image of Christ to make up one humanity in Him. This is not a view, or one critique among many. It is how things are from the perspective of the Kingdom of Heaven and how they ought to be conformed in the kingdoms of this world. In a Christian society, it is not merely to be taken into account by the rulers, but internalised and put into practice.

The alternative is a society defenceless against monstrosity. One hundred years ago, Britain and Ireland went to war in defence of “little Catholic Belgium”. Four years ago, the centuries-old “folk Catholicism” of Belgium and its uneasy modus vivendi with political liberalism were irrevocably shattered, when Bishop Roger Vangheluwe of Brugge admitted the sustained abuse of two nephews. Nuns were heckled in the streets, priests advised not to appear in public, the Archbishop of Brussels-Malines repeatedly assaulted with custard pies, and the retired Cardinal Danneels questioned by police. In March 2014 King Filip of the Belgians, whose uncle King Baudouin had abdicated rather than approve the legalisation of abortion, signed into law the euthanasia of children.

A remarkable recent book, Justice, Unity and the Hidden Christ, by Matthew John Paul Tan, explains what has been going on in advanced Western societies, by asking why, when there is so much need for Christians to unite in addressing the ills of society, and there are so many opportunities for the concerted social action in service of suffering humanity that Vatican II’s Decree on Ecumenism called for, Christian unity has not come to pass and the Church remains in a state of rupture. Tan locates the problem in the decision of the Church in the modern world to recognise the freedom of the world and its social, economic and political structures from the Church, allowing them to migrate beyond the realm of the Kingdom of God. The Church may seek to set the tone, but civil society and the state have autonomy in their own, separate sphere. Free from the boundaries of the reign of Christ, the state and civil society identify their own ultimate objective, which now becomes earth-and-time-bound, in preference to the end of all things - the good, and the coming of the Kingdom, such as we see in the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer.

Tan sees the Church in shock and denial at the flight of its child and what it has chosen for its path to happiness. For instead of the Kingdom, the state and civil society have chosen for their own the objectives of the unfettered market. This means unconstrained personal liberty, even to the interpersonal “violence” that means one person may prevail over the rest. In this context, says Tan, it is hardly surprising that the Churches have not been able to draw together in serving the realisation of the unity of humanity in Christ, because the new “state/society/market matrix” actively prevents them from doing so. The Christian Churches have been constrained to be part of a market of choice and competition – not just with each other but with every other ware on offer. Thus the Universal Catholic Church can hope at best, if it is to engage with the world to which it has given spiritual liberty, to serve as its chaplain. It is a far cry from Newman’s state with both a common bond of unity and a sentiment of sacredness, or even Mr Cameron’s socially responsible state, with faith woven through its “fabric”. But it is what we have come to.

Tan’s remedy is to say that the Church’s diakonia – its service of the Kingdom in and for the world - whether ecclesial or ecumenical - would be impossible now, unless it is united with its leitourgia. This is not just its “liturgy” as the work of the people to worship God, but the work of God for and upon the worshipping people.  By this he means that it is time for the Church to reassert itself as the alternative humanity, the “still more excellent Way”, restoring as its end the objective that points us towards God and his Kingdom. Thus humanity can recover a proper view of the human person, and of its relations with the other, that is not modelled on the untrammelled needs of the market and unfettered personal liberalism, but on the endless self-giving and mutually receiving of the persons of the Trinity, as the pattern for the people of God and the best, the only true, pattern for the whole of humanity.

With regard to our leitourgia – how we are the humanity focussed upon God and His Kingdom – Tan believes that the way we celebrate Mass and the direction we offer it actually conforms us to the “state-society-market matrix” that frustrates us so. In other words, we aim at ourselves and our own progress and development, rather than Christ and His Kingdom. This is why we are of no use to the world and why we cannot collaborate ecumenically in a lasting way that can be consolidated, in order to transform the ills of the world by looking to the transcending intervention of the Kingdom of God in our own hands as its People.

This is also why the People of God fails to exhibit itself as the Body of Christ; for, as chaplain to the “state-society-market matrix”, we are forced to pursue its objectives and not those of the Kingdom. The “matrix” will seek the Kingdom, not because the Church as its chaplain exhorts it to, but because that happens to suit its ends for the moment. People of God we may call ourselves, but we are merely “people” like anyone else, competing in the market place of ideas and offers and objectives. Hence, we need to declare our own freedom from this “matrix”, in order to reassert the sovereignty of God and the lack of society’s autonomy to direct itself as though it lies beyond the Kingdom of God and the hearing of the teaching of Christ and His Church. As Martin Luther said, “Let God be God” – not what political leaders, however well-meaning and personally devout, need Him to be and to mean from this day to that.

In 2013, a commemorative stone was set into the floor of the West Door of Westminster Cathedral, commemorating the visit of Pope Benedict XVI. Its Latin says that he “celebrated the Mass … showing what advantage faith may be to society.” Advantage? Is that all that is left for us to offer? Is faith not the “sentiment of sacredness” of a state’s very fabric, sealing that “common bond of unity” that forms society out of more than the mere coming together of otherwise divergent and sectional interests?

We are a country of wondrous diversity in which all have a stake and all possess rights and mutual obligations. Our traditions of freedom of speech, of personal and corporate religious liberty, of tolerance, equality and the rule of law have been won at the price of blood that live on in our collective memory as both defining our present identity and a warning from history. But our society is not Christian because Christianity transmits values we can all mostly sign up to, or because Christ reigns in all or some of our hearts, feebly or strongly, high in archbishops and ministers of the Crown, or low in us normal people around the altars and pulpits of our churches. It is Christian because the kingdoms of this world have become the Kingdom of Our Lord and of His Christ. This does not depend on a ministerial evaluation, or because the Church can make a convincing argument. Christ reigns in and over society, whatever we think. That is just the way humanity and the universe have been made. To this the Church holds it.

Homily for the Sunday of the Paralytic, 10 May, Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family

The early books of Alan Garner, supposedly written for children but no less captivating for the older child, open the imagination to unforeseen new dimensions. Thus he stands in the noble tradition of Tolkien, C S Lewis, George Macdonald and Charles Williams. They did not write science fiction or fantasies. What they set out to do was to tell the story of people’s lives and worlds, if we were to come across the same things by stepping into another universe. None of them are writing about utopias, where everything is sinless or perfect – far from it in Mordor and Narnia. Nor are they tales of magic, in which nature is gone against and impossible dreams conjured up into reality; where the obstacles of evil are smashed by a trick from outside help, instead of being worked on and worked with, repurposed, restored, remade, recreated from within. For this is what miracle is, the power of creation to thrive within the limitations of creation, and to overpower that which would thwart it, to transform and transcend it. C S Lewis calls this “deep magic”; the other writers, too, look for signs of a deeper reality that can take form in our world, and in our souls, but which is so difficult to grasp, even when we see its meaning at work before our very eyes.

So it is in Alan Garner’s story of Roland, Ellen and their friends. Elidor is set 40 years ago in grim, industrial, declining Salford. The children are playing around the slum clearances, yet warned not to enter an abandoned church itself in the process of demolition. But Roland hears a pure note of resounding music – a horn? a song? - that draws him into the church. The others follow and they find themselves in a beautiful land called Gorias, which also faces destruction and misrule. They are welcomed as saviours. The people of Gorias do not make them kings, or ask them to fight any last battles; instead they ask them to take the Treasures of Gorias, which are their symbols of justice, prosperity, authority and spiritual good, back to their own world for safekeeping, lest they fall into the hands of the wicked. Thus Roland, Ellen and their friends take away a gleaming sword, a cauldron of plenty, a spear and an ancient stone. Finding themselves coming out of the church, in their hands they see a jagged plank of wood, a broken cup, an iron railing and a lump of stone from the old church. They cannot explain or understand their Treasures. Soon they are pursued; they face mortal danger and then a terrible crisis, when their parents dispose of the “rubbish” they have collected. But they persevere; and one day the music resounds again, this time from within their closely guarded debris. The wicked have failed, the good have prevailed and the children are called back to restore the Treasures they had kept safe in hiding. On returning to Gorias they find they are carrying not the debris of destruction and decay but, once more, a sword, a cauldron, a spear and a stone of destiny.

Listening to the Scriptures today, we hear the first-hand accounts of people who met the apostles and the Lord Himself. Like the Treasures of Gorias, they are disregarded in this world, but bearers of the power of another. First we meet Aeneas, laid low from the fullness of active life for eight years, now told to rise up. Secondly, we meet Tabitha, who spent her life in goodness for others. Her untimely death clearly broke the hearts of the disciples, so they turned to someone whose name, like hers, had also been changed. They called on Peter the Rock of the Church, who had been transformed from the simple fisherman Simon. By faith in his Master, Simon Peter’s prayer raised Tabitha-Dorcas up. Finally, we meet a man by the pool of Bethsaida, who had been paralysed for thirty-eight years - so long that no one had noticed him, until Jesus walking by saw into his heart. It is the same story – the Lord sees the truth, and the patient hope of the people waiting for the Kingdom to come, and He wills its goodness to prevail and outlast what has, until then, defeated it.

He proposes to the paralysed man that he should stand up. When He talks of standing up, Jesus is pointing towards His resurrection from the dead, after the destruction of his life in the flesh on the Cross. But the apostle Peter is not merely looking back on the past and hoping prayer will patch people up, or even repeat the same return from the dead as happened to Jesus. He is drawing on the resurrection as a fact of existence – an ever present reality that has been opened up to us and is live and active.

For the resurrection we believe in and even now live in, is not an after death experience. It is not a remedy for ill, or a corrective to adversity. Nor is it a magicked happy ending to undo a disastrous finale. Neither is it the result of the death on the Cross, or the next step in unfolding events. In God’s plan, it is what was going to happen all along, because it is the nature of things all the way through.

I began with a story that shifted us in and out of different worlds, so that we had to think that what we see in this world is not how it is in another. So it is an interesting coincidence, too - is it not? – that in the Scriptures the word Bethzaida can mean both “the House of Mercy” and “the House of Disgrace”. There an old man who kept his eyes lowered in humiliation, from whom the world looked away in disgust, is the one to whom the Lord turned His mercy, and not to others. The one consigned to oblivion is remembered in the Kingdom. As for Roland and Ellen, the souvenirs of a day’s play on a demolition site can be known to be the Treasures in another world entirely. By the same token, the normal state of things in heaven appears different to us when they come into the dimension by which we are bounded. Thus, what does the life and person of God the Son look like when He enters the world? He takes on mortality in the cycle of creation. What is the human nature of the Second Person of the Trinity like, when He lives a Man among humans? He who endlessly and completely gives Himself out in unconditional love to the Father and the Spirit in heaven repeats the same pattern without ceasing, as He gives Himself out in conditional love to the Father and the Spirit within His creation. Here it leads to sacrifice and death on the Cross, but it is indistinguishable from the same Mystery of endlessly giving and being given which is the One God in Trinity. And what is the life of God the Son, when He has died to the world like all His human kind? He who endlessly and completely receives the unconditional self-giving of the Father and the Spirit in heaven, in the same pattern receives them within the creation; and it cannot be that any of His Person, even his crucified humanity, can remain in death. Having given Himself away completely, in love He is raised by the Father with the Spirit, since they never cease to give themselves completely to the Son. It is not just how it was always going to end; it is just how it is. What we have witnessed and experienced as Resurrection is the One God who exists as Trinity. And it is this existence, this inexhaustible power, this unconditional love, that Christ calls upon to raise the paralysed; that draws us up in resurrection even now; that animates the Church to stand up as image of the Trinity’s love and indestructible truth and justice; what is truly right and good in the world. As St Paul put it, “dying, behold, we live.”

In a few moments time, we will be drawn up above our mortal horizon into the dimension of heaven. We, the Church, will see the Lamb upon the throne and we will be asked to take the Treasure of the Kingdom and bring it into our world. We will see before us mere bread and wine, but we will know it to be the Body and Blood of Christ, God among us. As we feed on this Food, we will understand what it is for us people and our world of events, hurtling to history here, nonetheless to form the population of heaven - the operation of the very Kingdom of God - there on high in glory and the endless cycle of giving out in love and praise, here in the no less constant cycle of sacrifice, elevation on the Cross, resurrection and undying hope, as we face the blessedness without ever turning away. For heaven is not an aftermath, but the dimension of the earth as it is designed to be in the Kingdom of God, the ever giving and given God, who is ever descending to live in us that we may live through Him, and ever rising within us, so that, free of all that holds us back, we too may be raised, and live in the same unconditional love and inexhaustible hope.

Homily for Palm Sunday, 12 April/March 30 2014, Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, London

In the Kontakion for today, we sing:

Mounted on the throne in heaven, O Christ God, and on a colt here on earth, You accepted the praise of the angels, and the hymn of the children who cried to You: Blessed are You, Who have come to call back Adam. 

Even though this was written by St Romanos the Melodist a millennium and a half ago, it goes straight to our persistent mistake when considering Christ’s “work on earth” (St Thomas Aquinas, Verbum supernum prodiens). A familiar English Christmas carol – which as a whole stands as a beacon of faith in the Lord’s incarnation – has one line that reinforces our misunderstanding - “He came down to earth from heaven. ” We forget that the hymn goes on to say, “For that Child so dear and gentle is Our Lord in heaven above.” (Mrs C. F. Alexander, Once in Royal David’s city).Thus, as St Thomas Aquinas writes in a hymn of his, Christ is “The Word of God, proceeding forth, yet leaving not His Father’s side”; and, as St Romanos sings, Christ God is at one and the same time, “mounted on the throne in heaven, … and on a colt on earth.”
 
If we lose our grasp on what reality is, at one and the same time – heavenly and earthbound, God in man, “dying yet behold living”, sinner but forgiven, human and divine – we will tend to think of Jesus as an occasional visitor; a super-man from another world; or like Zeus, one who descends to the world of mortals concealed in mortal guise, exercises his intentions, performs his acts, works his wonders and then withdraws to the Olympian heights. But this is not the Christian faith. With Christ there are no departures from one state, no separate destinations in another. It is all one.
 
The entire purpose of Christ our God, as Christ the Man, is not to leave things behind as he moves ever on, but to unite all things in heaven and all things in the world. Thus the Child in the Manger, as another hymn puts it, is “The great God of heaven, … The Ancient of Days … an hour or two old”. (Henry Ramsden Bramley). Thus, too, the “Lord, enthroned in heavenly splendour .. risen, ascended, glorified”, is the Lord on the Cross, whose offering ... “in its fullness undiminished shall for evermore remain … cleansing souls from every stain.” (G. H. Bourne). It is all the One Lord God the Son, the One Lord Son of Man.
 
So, when we throng with the crowds today and cry out “Hosanna”, we are not congratulating an earthly liberator, just before things turn ugly for him and we make ourselves pretend we never said it, before covering it up with a new cry of “Crucify Him”. Far from it; we are crying out, “Hosanna in the highest.” This Master of ours, on his colt on earth, we are likewise addressing as God on his throne in heaven. We recognise Him Who has come in the Name of the Lord – which means that he bears the Name of the Lord. The Holy Name given to us for Him is Jesus, “Yeshua”, and this means “the God who saves”. In other words, “Jesus” is first a title to describe Him and His work, before it is a personal Name for him. His own personal Name is the Name that can never be uttered, because it is so sacred and so intimate to His very Being that we know it simply as “the Name of the Lord”. And this is how the children of the Hebrews blessed “God who saves” - with His Name, “The Lord”. They greeted Him with shouts of joy. But they did not praise Him, by saying “Alleluia”, as you might expect. Instead, in their expectation and exultation, they called him their Saviour, shouting, “Hosanna”: “rescue us.”
 
I have always found it striking that in response to this clamour, Jesus, who had carefully planned the entrance into Jerusalem in fine detail, says nothing. Why does He show no emotion? His disciples are confused. But we need to remember that this is not just an earthly event. It is an action of God – the Lord on his colt here on earth, saying not a word, is the same Lord who is mounted on the throne in heaven. In other words, the Son of Man, Jesus, is revealing the nature of God the Son of heaven. And this is the God who makes Himself known to us - through suffering, as Servant of the divine purpose for the salvation of humanity. He said nothing, because (Isaiah 53.7):
 

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.

Here, once more, St Romanos sums it up:  

Blessed are You, who have come to call back Adam.

 
For it is in silence that His appeal is resounding. The actions speak louder than words. Adam, all humanity, is called back to God through watching what he is doing. He has been anointed by Mary the sister of Lazarus, and Jesus observes that it is the only burial anointing He will get. From this moment on, he “sets His Face to Jerusalem”: to the confrontation in the Temple, to His trials, to the gathering of darkness, to being lifted up on the Cross and to the vital importance of believing and keeping in the Light of God. All this is what charges His intent, as He gets up on a donkey to work His way through and beyond the crowds. Did He much acknowledge them, did he give much of His thinking away as he rode past, single-mindedly concentrating on what lay ahead?
 
Thirty years ago last September, I was living in Jerusalem. Walking in the Kidron Valley near the Tomb of Mary, I saw a procession of local Christians all in white, waving palms. It was a funeral procession to the cave-shrine where the Mother of God had first been laid to rest before her Assumption. It occurred to me forcefully that the Lord’s Entrance to Jerusalem was not just the triumphant entry of a Saviour for a Kingdom not of this world, but, along with the anointing, the only funeral rites the Lord would receive.
 
His silence as he goes is deafening; for it is from the throne in heaven that the Saviour on His colt on earth calls back Adam to God. His action is a marvel to behold; and we must guard ourselves from being caught up in the exuberant reception, so as to be still, to watch what is actually happening:  

The Word of God, proceeding forth yet leaving not His Father’s side…

 
.. is going ahead into the darkness of the old city, to be blamed, to be tried, to be condemned, to be lifted up. Yet, as he enters the Golden Gate leading to the Temple, he remains the Light that shines in that darkness, the Light that the darkness cannot comprehend. And we are witnesses to the Light that enlightens everyone (John 1), for we watched as He went His way in silence; and we saw ... 

The Saving Victim, opening wide the gate of heaven to man below (St Thomas Aquinas)

 
(not “man below”, but the opening of “heaven … below”!) For today’s mystery is this: Just as Christ God on a colt on earth is mounted on the throne in heaven, so Adam and the world of humanity, even in the midst of our wanderings, are “called back” to enter the new Jerusalem and dwell even now in the immortality of the Kingdom.


Blessed is He Who comes in the Name of the Lord: Glory to Jesus Christ.

Three new Music items uploaded, with more to come:

• Hymn to St Edmund, King & Martyr (recalling my time as precentor at St Edmundsbury Cathedral) - the words are by John Mason Neale
• A Pilgrimage Hymn to Our Lady of Walsingham, commissioned from me in the early 1980s by the Anglican Shrine at Walsingham, but never used there
• The Gospel Acclamations in Lent set to Genevan psalm tunes. There is a venerable tradition (in which Neale was the master) of setting the chants of the ancient liturgies to post Reformation hymn and psalm tunes in the tradition of Anglican Patrimony. I make no claims for the adaptations of the appointed chants from the Roman Lectionary, but it may be useful to have this noble music available for them to be sung to, rather than their being merely said, or replaced by a hymn or other liturgical song. The excellent Christoph Tietze did the same service for the Introit Chants, which are versified and sung to chorale tunes - dignified and beautiful effect - at the Cathedral of St Mary of the Assumption at San Francisco.

Please go to the Music page for the downloads. Everything I place there is free to use for personal and liturgical purposes.

Homily for the Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy

First Sunday of Lent 2014 – Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, London W1

At first sight it looks strange that, just as we begin to keep Lent, we mark its first Sunday with a celebration. The Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy marks the decision of the Synod of Constantinople in 842 that ended once and for all the Iconoclast Controversy that had disturbed the peace and unity of the Eastern Church of the Roman Empire for a hundred years. This controversy was not just a question of whether sacred images were permissible in Church, but of the very nature of how you believe in Christ and what you believe Him to be.

For instance, you will see pictures of old Byzantine churches where, in place of the image you expect in the apse of the Mother of God bearing Our Lord, the Iconoclasts placed instead the plain representation of the Cross; it bears no figure of the Crucified Lord. There are some who say that the banishing of wall-images and icons from churches took the ban on “graven images” in the Ten Commandments in the Book of Exodus to extreme. Others say that it was a reaction to the rise of Islam, for Muslims misunderstood that the Christian veneration of images is not the worship of them, but worship of the inexpressible Divine Mystery that they depict and draw us into; thus, it is said, Iconoclast Christians were striving for it to be clear that they were not idolatrous pagans to be converted to Islam but the People of the Book who worship the God of Abraham alone. Still others liken this controversy to the Latin Church’s “Reformation”-“Counter-Reformation” struggle, the defining moment for Byzantine Christianity: one side saying that God and the glory of His saints cannot be portrayed in man-made pictures lest it debase Him to the worldly order of human sinfulness – a cutting down of the Kingdom of heaven to man’s size; while the other was saying that if you exclude images of Christ, the Mother of God, the mysteries of salvation and of the glorified saints, you are denying the truth of the incarnation itself and the sheer physicality of God’s constant dealings with humanity in the world. If so, you are effectively saying that God cannot take form in the created world, He cannot be viewed as man, and He cannot be shown in His glory and in His saints. You are saying that the created world - and humanity within it - does not bear what the Scriptures and the Church return to time again: that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, that Christ, true God and true Man, is the Image of the unseen God, that the Church which is His Body is the fullness of Him who fills the universe, and that the whole of humanity – together and as individuals – bears the very image of God. For Christianity is not just a matter of what is written in the Book, or believed in the heart and mind, or acted out in discipleship and the rites of worship. It is about the union of God and humanity, God become man, and Man-in-Christ, full of grace and truth, endowed with glory, making humanity one with the very life of God Himself.

In the argument between emperors, bishops, monks, armies and faithful that had lasted for decades, the Seventh Ecumenical Council settled it, the state power intervened, images were banished from churches, orthodox bishops deposed, and clergy exiled and persecuted, until the Constantinople Synod in February 842  confronted the stark choice between all or nothing – is the Church orthodox or heretical? Does it believe in the Incarnation of God in Man or not? Does Christ fill His material creation and is His glory to be seen and shown in it, or not? Do we behold Emmanuel, God among us, or do we fail to contemplate the mystery that seeks to draw us in, here in our midst?  Resoundingly the Synod chose orthodox Christian faith. The first session closed with a triumphant procession, in which the images were restored to the Great Church, Hagia Sophia, the true faith was articulated and false belief named and expressly rejected. From that day, the First Sunday of Lent recalls us not to an historical event 1300 years ago, but to the abiding, annual need each Lent to return to God, not just from our sins but also from our wanderings, constantly back to the Truth, the reality of who Christ is, why He came and how He comes to us still.

The reading from the Apostle (Hebrews 11) reminds us that keeping faith with Christ has been costly, from the times of the Scriptures and of St John the Baptist into the present day. We see it especially at the moment in Syria and Nigeria in the martyrdom and persecution of clergy and lay people, and the kidnap of bishops, priests and religious sisters. We see it in the recently attempted suppression of this Greek-Catholic Church by the last government in Ukraine. We see it in the massive scattering of Christian communities dating from the time of Christ, out of the Middle Eastern cradle of the Church as refugees to the four corners of the globe. Thus the Church today follows in the footsteps of the Master and those who have gone before us. The Apostle therefore calls Him our pioneer who perfects our faith the more we follow along the narrow path He trod; and he calls those who have taken it ahead of us our witnesses. “Witness” is what martyr means. And it is why we keep the Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy today. When we look at the images, the icons, it is not we who are looking at them, witnessing their existence, or significance, or presence, but they who are looking at us, witnessing us, representing the significance and the presence of Christ.

For the Iconostasis before us is not a shield to restrict our view of the Holy Mysteries, but the frontier of paradise from which the Lord on His Throne and His saints in glory gaze out upon us. What is in their gaze? We can readily imagine they see sin and imperfection. But they also see those whom God loves, redeems and saves. They see our repentance and our adoration and our own love, encouraging it, deepening it with their prayers, because – by the mercy of God working in us – it proceeds from honesty, it is genuine, “coming out of hiding”, realistic about how things are with God, yet also things about us longing to be what they should become. Thus the Lord and His saints who pray for us see the Truth at work within us – the truth about Christ as God made man Whose image is still conforming humanity to Him.

But the truth about us is also that the more this image of God within us looks out to meet the gaze of Christ, the more we would deform, disfigure it;  mask it and encrust it; and prefer that it looked away from the glory.

All during the week, we have seen images of human beings who cannot tell the truth – not just leaders corrupted by power and greed, but other men of violence hiding their faces, concealing their true identity, bearing false witness, wearing the uniforms of others to sow discontent and mistrust, and blaming their wrongful deeds on the innocent. These are people who cannot take the stare of God. They are naked in the Garden of Eden and it is shame that makes them clothe themselves over. Thus do they cover up the image of God within them, because it shines too beautiful to show, when dishonesty is required for the deeds of darkness. But in return, as G. K. Chesterton put it, “God abides in a terrible patience, unangered, unworn.”  God in Christ looks out with His saints on the sheer Truth and untruth of it all with love. So great is their glory that they are undisturbed in peace. The image of Him, the vision of Him, moves us to repentance, not so much out of our sense of remorse at our sins as out of our picking up on His longing for the same glory as His to be ours. St Philip says to us, “Come and see”. We too are intrigued, and we see the Lord; we open our hearts and mouths to confess Him Son of God and our King. He tells us we will see greater things and heaven opened before us.

 

So it was for the Fathers of the Synod in February 842. So it is for us this Sunday of Orthodoxy’s Triumph a millennium and centuries later. We have beheld the Truth about God and the truth about ourselves. As the Troparion we have sung today puts it,

“We bow before Your most pure image, O kind Lord and beg pardon for our sins, O Christ our God…. You… free Your handiwork from enslavement to the enemy … By coming to save the world, our Saviour, You filled all things with joy.

So let it be that a world that cannot bear the truth about itself, and the people that hide in untruth and cowardly darkness because they cannot bear Christ’s glory to show them in its light, will likewise come out, come and see, see greater things, behold heaven opened and stand in the gaze of Christ pouring glory into his saints, filling the space where sin is washed away with nothing but joy.

 

 

Address to Churches Together in Mayfair: at Byzantine Vespers in the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity 2014

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

23 January 2014

Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, London

Address to Churches Together in Mayfair

Exodus 19. 3-8

We love to describe ourselves as what the Lord meant us to be for him, as his own people – a Kingdom of priests, a holy nation. But we are less keen on the other side of the covenant we entered, when we said, “Whatever the Lord has said, we will do”.

What did the Lord say? On the night before he died, he said, “Father, as you and I are one, may they all be one, so that the world may believe it was you who sent me.” Well, he said it; and we say we will do it.

The trouble is that we have been saying we will do it for hundreds of years. What we have meant is that we will bring about unity when other people come round to our ways, and when we can prevail as they submit. Each of us belongs to a Church body that we think is, in some ways, the right one; each of us thinks our take on the Truth is truer, at least for us and our way of thinking; each one of us thinks our Church body is better organised for the task in hand, or is a more faithful embodiment of the Gospel.  Yes; we must be faithful to the vision we have each been given and the call that each Church body has received. But it is not the end of the story for any of us. The principle and integrity, to which we cleave and which appear to keep us divided now, should be seen only in the light of the unity of the Church from which all derives and to which all returns. Thus the times when a Church exhorted others to give in, and to come round to its position ought to be long gone (though some people still try it on). Apart from anything else, it is futile. For example, we live in an age where people are loyal to the banks, the shops, the TV stations and the clothing brands they know; but they feel quite at liberty to change, and not to be defined by anyone other than what they choose. The more we try to force an identity on people, the more people will suit themselves, especially if it is over against others. People will feel they can take this from here and that from there, making up a Church to their taste, and retuning Gospel message only to the frequency they want to hear. So, forcing an identity on a Church body that is not natural to it would undermine what each of us, in our different Church bodies, is witnessing to as the Truth that we possess: that there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father, and one Church in the life of the Spirit. We are right, each of us, to say we have the Truth and that we are the true Church – but only if we remember that this will only make complete sense when we are utterly united and can be seen to be at one. In the meantime, to be partisan and competitive about our Church is not to be faithful to the integrity of the faith that we have received and follow in conscience, but to make it just one more competing choice among many.

The famous 1910 Edinburgh Mission Conference - the start of the modern ecumenical movement - was a concerted effort to end rivalry between European and North American Churches in world missionary endeavours. It had been realised that Churches’ self-interest was an obstacle to presenting the Gospel. The penny had dropped – the Churches were not one, but many: and people who had begun to listen about Christ would hear no more, because the noisy messages of a Presbyterian Christ, a Lutheran Christ, a Catholic Christ were unbelievable.

When Pope Benedict came to visit us three and a half years ago, he reminded us in the magnificent Anglican Evensong in the Abbey that, however far we have come in love and friendship, however closely we work together on addressing the ills and injustices of the world side by side, however great our solidarity in spirit is, nonetheless our disunity in living together the Church’s and sharing in the risen Christ’s own Body at worship means that, to the world, we fail to give a convincing account of the hope that lies within us.

Yesterday, Pope Francis said much the same thing, but in his usual direct way.  He said,

It is good to recognise the grace with which God blesses us and, moreover, to find in other Christians something which we need, something we can receive as a gift from our brothers and sisters. The Canadian group which has prepared this Prayer Week has not invited the communities to think about what they might give to their Christian neighbours, but rather … to understand what all communities can receive from time to time from the others. This requires something more. It requires humility, reflection and continual conversion. Let us follow this path, praying for Christian unity and an end to this scandal.

106 years ago in 1908, the Anglican rector of Moreton-in-Marsh, Spencer Jones, and a Roman Catholic Franciscan friar in New York, Paul Wattson, after six years of correspondence, became so thoroughly convinced in their own minds of the scandal of disunity that they set up a Church Unity Octave - a whole week of prayer from 18 to 25 January. The Anglican believed that his Church, even though it was a towering presence in English Church and Society as a whole, was nonetheless cut off from the universal Church of which it saw itself as a part. He was penetratingly clear of the need for the Church of England and the Catholic Church to reunite, not to change the Church of England into something it was not, but so that together - and in the harness of the same faith - they could strengthen each other’s proclamation of the Gospel - and be believed. At the same time, the Catholic in New York realised that his Roman Catholic Church, for all that he saw it to be possessed of everything needed for the Church to be fully the Church of Jesus Christ, is nonetheless lacking in something: those who do not belong to it! He saw too that it lacked the many blessings in faith and holiness that had clearly been bestowed on others in abundance. Surely God did not give spiritual treasure to his People, so that only some could benefit to the exclusion of others? He longed for unity and to receive and grow through the same holy gifts. By the same token, he longed for other Christians to see what he loved in the Catholic Church and come to love it as a gift for them to long for too. But he refused to pray against other Churches, or their beliefs. He and his English Anglican friend desired the Church and the Christians who belong to it to be drawn together in one Church.

Twenty five years later, a French priest, the beloved Paul Couturier, was taken up with the same idea. But he saw that Christian Unity, and the sharing of God’s spiritual riches that we have received while we are apart, can never be enjoyed by offloading them onto others unbidden, by imposing them because we think we know better or think we ARE better, teaching other people what we think they need to learn. No; in the divided Church as it is in the world, we can only share in these divine gifts, by asking to receive them, not as little commodities to suit our individual tastes, but as part of what make the whole Church universal. Couturier had this idea that we could take on each other’s gifts of God’s blessings and then outdo each other in growing in them. We could thus vie with each other in advancing in holiness, drawing closer to Christ from where we started out in isolation, until we were united in him and found ourselves united to each other. Thus he thought our parallel lives would converge as we grew in love, and faith and spiritual knowledge.

Nevertheless, here we are, 106 years after Spencer Jones and Paul Wattson first became impatient, still disunited. Here we are, a Kingdom of priests, saying we will do what the Lord says, but not obeying his prayer - addressed as much to us as to his Father – that we be one, so that the world might believe. Here we are finding ever new reasons to back up our separations and to continue to go on in our preferable own way. As Pope Francis says, it is a scandal. And as the world tells us, with its deeply unanswered questioning, we are unconvincing.

Yet to lose heart after all these years of prayer together is to forget what we have seen. The Lord reminds is of “how I carried you away on eagles’ wings and brought you to me”. We have come so far.

We understand that we do not need all to be the same, in order to be Christian. The Pope, like his predecessors, reminds us that other Christians teach us the things we still need. We can attend each other’s worship and combine our efforts to meet the needs of the world. We draw on each others’ traditions and are constantly enriched as we do so. This service tonight is in its way a small miracle. The Ukrainian Church this week is facing a deep crisis in the country that is its homeland; nonetheless it desires to play its part as an integral part of the Christian Church here in England. It brings with it the tradition of ancient Christian Byzantium, in its fusion of monastic psalms and hymns, with the drama of the light, the incense and the icons that are at the heart of Eastern Christian devotion to our Lord, as somehow we pass into the courts of heaven as we worship in the Church below. (Hymns were not only invented in recent English history - tonight’s come from the first millennium!) And after Vespers there will be more recent Christmas and Epiphany carols from Ukraine. Thus English-language Christianity, the liturgy of the Christian Roman emperors and the music of Ukrainians all come together, as do we, joined by beauty in worship and hope.

In this giving and receiving, it is as though there is something in our Christianity - when it is truly the faith of Christ - that is restless for as long as it is not the faith that can be shared with and embraced by all who love and follow Jesus our Lord. We have been learning for years, almost without noticing, to go beyond ourselves, so as to find how to be more truly the Church that is Universal, with the whole faith, in the whole Christ, for the whole of humanity. We have all looked at our Churches and asked ourselves, “Can we imagine what more can be added, what new space can be opened up in our Church, so that it can also be the home that others can recognise as their own?” All of our Churches have acted on this questioning in the past, and it has made us what we are today. For instance, the Catholic Church has learned not to be a monolithic institution but a communion of Churches, movements, and new ideas that can embrace people in the way that God has called them to hear his gospel.  We have our parishes, priest, bishops, dioceses and religious orders, but we also have our new lay-led renewal and evangelical mission movements, offering and exploring new ways of being the Church for England’s people.

The Catholic Church does not wish simply to be a Roman Catholic denomination, but to be more and more like the universal Church, honouring and embracing the Church of others on their own terms but in complete communion of united life and faith. I like to hope that the Ordinariate, for instance, will one day come to be seen as a way for the Catholic Church to embrace a religious tradition from which it was once estranged and live out in a prophetic way that Anglicans and Catholics can live as one in communion, united not absorbed, not amalgamated and assimilated, but in the lively, diverse, abundant communion of all the People of God in the one Body of Christ His Son. There is great ecumenical potential to be tapped and it should bring us close in respect, understanding and conscientious faith.

Likewise the Salvation Army, which every Christian in this land loves and rejoices in, represents a movement that was organised to meet the needs of the poor and destitute, and to bring them to the love of Christ on his Cross, in a way that no other Church could at the time. It still meets those that not all of us can. We have all gained so much from the gift of confidence in each other and trust from God that means we can do this work alongside each other, with mutual encouragement and mutual reliance. The Church of England, too, with its cultural-spiritual heritage, its liturgical and musical tradition, as well as its pastoral mission visible and active into every corner of the country, is a resource for the whole Church that is never static. For instance, it has sought to be imaginative in fresh expressions of Christianity that can meet the religious awareness of contemporary people but still take root in the wider Church. Even the Grosvenor Chapel began as a “fresh expression,” addressing unmet needs, and to this day creating distinctive Christian community. From all this, in a bewildering world of beliefs to choose, both sacred and secular, we learn that none of us can make it separately. We rely on each other, not only for aid and support, but for learning more about how Christ’s is the pattern we live as His Body, the pattern for the whole of humanity that stands in His image.

Thus the prayers of 106 weeks of prayer have been richly answered. The miracle of unity, when it is achieved will be God’s. We can take down our sinful man-made barriers and persist on the journey whose destination was determined at the outset. We should not fail to see how the Lord has taught us to turn to each other in our need to learn, and moreover planted that seed of imagination of how it could be - what it would be like - if we in our currently separate Churches could live as one, solid Church, a rock that the world could rely on and believe when they see it.

Long divisions that plague the Church: Article about Orthodox-Catholic unity in The Tablet

In 1923, a schoolteacher priest of Lyon started devoting his spare time to helping the 10,000 refugees from Bolshevism camped and lodged around the city and its suburbs. It was his first encounter with a Christianity that was not Roman Catholic. Thus he learned the friendship of receiving as well as giving, finding great respect for the Orthodox clergy and people in their moment of destitution, as his heart opened to their faith and the beauty of their worship. He was astonished to find Catholics from the old Russian Empire who were not Latins, but Eastern Christians who maintained their unity with the Bishop of Rome with roots to before the Great Schism. Over the next decade, Paul Couturier became convinced of the need for Christian unity, and in 1935 he took hold of the Catholic Church Unity Octave, founded in 1908, and developed it into a “Universal Week of Prayer for the Unity of Christians in the charity and truth of Christ”. Inspired by the holiness of the Orthodox, beyond this world he imagined an “invisible monastery”, in which all could unite in prayer to God in Heaven, in the hope of seeing the same union realised in the Church here. He took for his motto the saying of Metropolitan Platon Gorodetsky of Kiev: “The walls of separation do not rise as far as Heaven.”

In answer to 105 Weeks of Prayer so far, considerable grace has been bestowed. All along, the 1,000-year separation between Christians of East and West has spurred us to overcome sinful division, and yet seek unity with integrity, respecting the faith that each professes. Thus the World Council of Churches, partly founded to promote reconciliation for all humanity after the degradation of the Second World War, enjoys the full membership of the Orthodox Church alongside the Churches that developed after the Western Reformation. The World Council and the Catholic Church are joint members of the even older Commission on Faith and Order, one of whose tasks is the organisation of each year’s Week of Prayer. For 50 years, the great families of Churches have undertaken ­searching theological dialogues, even if new challenges have been emerging. These have gone far towards profound mutual awareness of our belief and teaching, repeatedly consigning estrangement and rivalry to the past.

The same desire for unity, something more than ecumenism, is replicated in thousands of concrete examples of our Churches’ shared projects and resources in the service of the Kingdom in wider society, spiritual life in common through prayer, pilgrimage and study, and proclamation alongside each other of the same Christ before the world. Over the last year, it has been remarkable to see Christians of all kinds take Pope Francis to their hearts and sustain him with their prayers. It has been especially striking to hear Orthodox clergy and people observe how in contemporary society, with its secularising pressures and the globalisation that has sent the West east and the East west, our various Catholic and Orthodox Churches live beside each other, and how we need to rely on each other more and more. In this country, for instance, the steady development of English-speaking Orthodox Churches, together with the considerable influx of Eastern Christians from Russia, Ukraine and Romania, means that local Orthodox and Catholic priests are getting to know each other better, share similar concerns on family life, teach Christian ­discipleship in the Church from a similar ­outlook on the world, and seek to work more closely together, for instance, on the education of children, church schools, chaplaincy in ­hospitals and prison, and the education and formation of adults and priests. Only last week, Pope Francis gave his blessing to the Catholic Committee for Cultural Collaboration between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, which supports Orthodox laypeople and clergy studying in Catholic academic institutions. In its fourth year, the Centre for Eastern Christianity at Heythrop is a significant means for just such encounters for mutual learning here in England.

During Pope Benedict’s pontificate, the Moscow patriarchate picked up on his call for a New Evangelisation and pledged itself to an alliance with the Roman Catholic Church in what it called the struggle for the soul of Old Europe. The installation of Pope Francis was attended by many Orthodox representatives, led for the first time by the Ecumenical ­Patriarch, Bartholomew of Constantinople, whom he addressed as “my brother Andrew”. Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, the head of the department for external affairs of the Moscow patriarchate, has since returned to Rome to speak at a conference jointly arranged with the Pontifical Council for the Family. In the last few weeks, when asked about the prospects for a papal visit to Russia, he confirmed that the problems first to be resolved are not dogmatic, but rather ones which, he says, need clarification through dialogue.

But the way ahead is not all clear. Patriarch Bartholomew has just convoked the heads of the Orthodox Churches to discuss plans for the next preparatory commission ahead of the forth­coming Pan-Orthodox Synod scheduled for 2015. Bartholomew is concerned that in the present world the Orthodox Church as a whole needs to work more closely together and discuss how, beyond their respective homelands, the different Orthodox Churches relate to the other in the diaspora, as well as to the other Christian Churches. The invitation came at the same time as Moscow released its long-awaited position statement on the Ravenna document from the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches in 2006. This ­examined the role of primacy in the universal Church and thus the role of the Roman papacy. It looked behind the theories ­developed over 1,000 years of separate ­development, in search of how it functioned historically in the first 1,000 years of ­communion. Yet the modern Russian Church’s memory post-dates this shared experience and its own perspective is of “home rule” from Moscow. Thus the statement sees the universal Church as a communion of self-governing Churches, in which the Bishop of Rome possesses no overall jurisdiction but simply a primacy of honour. The statement has won strongly worded ripostes from the ecumenical ­patriarchate, identifying an exclusive ­nationalism and self-marginalisation on Moscow’s part that has no place in Orthodoxy. As one senior Orthodox ecumenist has observed, “Before we can talk to you Catholics about union again, we Orthodox need to come to agreement among ourselves.”

But the Russian Orthodox Church – by far the largest – sees itself as the natural leader in Orthodoxy and thus, for all practical purposes, the crucial interlocutor with the Catholic Church as its peer. It sees a contrast between successive Popes’ call for ­“communion, not jurisdiction” and how the Eastern Catholic Churches are perceived to be managed by a department of the Latin Roman pontiff’s Curia. Like many Orthodox, it is looking to see if Pope Francis’ curial reform will alter the role of the Congregation for the Oriental Churches in those Churches’ ­governance and relationship with the Bishop of Rome. Will they be self-ruling like Moscow? Could there be synodality between pope and patriarchs?

At the same time, Moscow’s self-understanding as the leader of all the Eastern Christians in its region – including the Belarussians and the Ukrainians – makes for an uneasy relationship with the reality of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church. Persecuted by Stalin and forced to conform to the Russian Church or go underground for four decades, it is once more threatened with legal deregistration, amid the Ukrainian Government’s difficulties with a substantial yet peaceful pro-Western protest movement that it falsely links to the Greek-Catholic bishops. At the same time, the Moscow Patriarchate stresses that the alliance it desires with the papacy is with a firmly Roman Catholic Church.

With so many considerations and principles for all sides at play, the unity we pray for is not going to come easily. But the desire for Catholic-Orthodox communion is perhaps stronger than ever and in May it will take Pope Francis and Patriarch Bartholomew to pray for it with all their heart and strength in Jerusalem.

Mark Woodruff,
The Tablet, 18 January 2014